All posts by Vaibhav Sharma

Arguably the fastest way to order an Apple product online is though the company’s Apple Store App. Previously it was only available in countries where Apple’s official online store existed. However it is now available in India as well. Earlier you had to sign in with an Apple account associated with another country to download it.

You can choose a country and proceed to use the app as if you were there. This would be useful for those looking to order the iPhone X from countries such as the US, as now the warranty would remain valid in India as well.

Even since I came across Raju PP’s post on how Apple has expanded warranty coverage in India for iPhones bought abroad, social media is full of posts about how people are going to import their iPhone X from the US (Rs. 73,000 incl. tax starting versus Rs. 89,000 in India) or any other country where its cheaper. While that might save you money now, there is one essential aspect that people forget is that internationally bought iPhone won’t be eligible for insurance in India. At launch getting a broken iPhone 7 Plus swapped cost around 34,000 INR, and the repair price for the iPhone X will certainly be even greater. Given Apple’s reliability otherwise, insurance may be more important than warranty alone.

As a matter of policy, all major providers like Syska or New India etc require a bill issued in India before they sell you coverage. Therefore the only hope is if you purchase Apple Care from the country the phone was bought. But even that doesn’t guarantee that damage related incidents will be covered in another country, its a grey area. The Apple Care US policy seems to restrict coverage internationally, but Apple Australia seems to permit it. Therefore this option is also a hit or miss situation.

Apple recently introduced new pricing slabs for the App Store in ’emerging’ markets that let developers charge less than the standard 1 USD minimum that we have come to expect. Today a new section went up in the App Store that highlights some of these apps and games that are priced at just Rs. 10 i.e. less than one fifth of a Dollar.

The section includes some pretty useful apps, such as Pixelmator that otherwise sells for 5$. For anyone switching from Android, that will help ease the pain of buying new apps and rebuilding the library, but for someone firmly in Apple’s ecosystem, it’s like apps just went free.

One word of caution though, there still seems to be some backend issues that Apple needs to fix. For example the App Store showed me a ₹10 price, but I was actually billed the standard ₹60 when I bought the App, the price it’s on sale for currently (1$).

Apple today made available the first public beta of iOS 9, and with the beta comes access to Apple’s brand-new News application. However this application is only available in select countries such as the United States for now.

But since this is one of the headline features for iOS 9, it seems only fair that those of us outside the supported countries should also get access to it. Fortunately the fix is very simple, all you need to do is go to Settings>General>Language & Region and set the ‘Region’ to United States. Then simply reboot the iPad/iPhone and you’ll see the News app on the home screen.

Banks making smartphone apps is all the rage these days, but the new frontier is wearables. One of the first banks in India to the party is HDFC, with its Apple Watch app.

The app works by first asking you to setup a watchbanking pin on the iPhone app, and then entering those 4 digits on the watch. Post that the app logs you in without having to enter the Customer ID or password, making the entire process very convenient. There is however, as always, a flip side to convenience. You cannot do a whole lot, and certainly not move money around right from the watch, as that would be a potential security nightmare; what with the app protected by just a 4 digit pin.

But there is still a lot of functionality that makes HDFC’s app a nifty addition to your wrist.

You can view account information for all your accounts – saving, current, demat, credit card and so on.

A component of Apple Music that really differentiates it from other solutions is its ‘Apple Connect’ functionality that lets you follow your favourite artists, in what feels like a mashup of following them on Twitter and Facebook, but in one timeline.

However, a lot of us simply won’t use it that much, and it would be so much easier if it were possible to replace that handy shortcut with ‘Playlists’, a tab you’ll use far more frequently. It is.

To do so goto Settings>General>Restrictions and enable restrictions, if you haven’t already. From that screen simply disable ‘Apple Music Connect’.